Despite not winning any Grammys at the weekend, 1989's sales figures still increased and held off challenges by Ed Sheeran and Sam Smith.

It’s getting to be a bit like Groundhog Day… another Wednesday, another week at Number 1 for the musical machine that is Taylor Swift. 1989 has notched up an eleventh non-consecutive week at the top of the US Billboard 200, according to figures released by Nielsen SoundScan.

It means that the album, released 15 weeks ago way back November, is now equal with Swift’s second record Fearless for her longest reign at the top. In all that time, it has been no lower than Number 2, interrupted by one week stints for One Direction, J.Cole, Meghan Trainor and Fall Out Boy.

Also, Jerry can't say no. To anybody. He acquiesces to Amanda when she invites her arguably even-more-insane mother (Stockard Channing) -- freshly divorced for the seventh time -- to live in their two-room Upper East Side apartment, where she practices for her latest life-fulfilling fantasy of putting together a lounge act. And he gets pushed around by his friend David Dobel (Allen himself), a compulsively paranoid, rambling fellow comic (and schoolteacher by day) who starts off giving Jerry relationship advice and ends up trying to turn the kid into an armed army-surplus survivalist.

"This is one of those avant-garde things, is it?" says a droll, dubious and dying Cole Porter (Kevin Kline) as he sits in an empty theater at the beginning of "De-Lovely," watching his life pass before his eyes on the stage, in a production conducted by an enigmatic, ironic, ethereal director named Gabe (Jonathan Pryce).

The answer to his question is a delighted "yes." This film is an imaginative, deconstructionist, celebratory musical biography woven together from elements of theater, meta-cinema, chamber drama and Porter's own MGM musicals with gratifying -- if deliberately glossy -- results.

Kline opens the picture as a frail but feisty old man (the age makeup is remarkable) who, as he watches his own story unfold, is alternatively tickled ("Oh, look, it's an opening number!"), critical ("He'd never wear that! Change it."), fondly reminiscent and pained by regret. And the actor also plays the younger Porter in the bulk of the picture, which has a merry, dreamlike quality to its stop-and-start interactions with the elderly Porter and his theatrical spirit guide.